Dismantling A Nation

The first academic volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices and culture from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation takes as its point of departure a radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its colonial, capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule, proposing otherwise forms of inhabiting, creating, and relating in a more fluid, contingent, ecocritical, feminist, and caring worlds. From the case of Chile, the book expands the scholarly discussion around decolonial methodologies, attending to artistic practices and discourses from distinct and distant locations-from Arica and the Atacama Desert to Wallmapu and Tierra del Fuego, and from the Central Valley, the Pacific coast, and the Andes to territories beyond the nation's modern geographical borders. Analyzing how these practices refer to issues such as the environmental and cultural impact of extractivism, as well as memory, trauma, collectivity, and resistance towards neoliberal totality, the volume contributes to the fields of art history and visual culture, memory, ethnic, gender, and Indigenous studies, filmmaking, critical geography, and literature in Chile, Latin America, and other regions of the world, envisioning art history and visual culture from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective.

This book provides a political economy perspective on recent changes within Canadian public administrative practice and structure, revealing the theoretical and practical underpinnings of neoliberal public administration. The role of globalization, state fiscal crisis, economic restructuring, and the ideological shift to the political right are viewed as central explanatory factors in public administrative and public policy change.

This book examines the process of dismantling the democratic institutions and protections in Venezuela under the Hugo Chávez regime. The actions of the Chávez government have influenced similar processes and undemocratic manoeuvrings in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Honduras. Since the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998, a sinister form of nationalistic authoritarianism has arisen at the expense of long-established democratic standards. During the past decade, the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution has been systematically attacked by all branches of the Chávez government, particularly by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, which has legitimized the Chávez-ordered constitutional violations. The Chávez regime has purposely defrauded the Constitution and severely restricted representative government, all in the name of a supposedly participatory democracy controlled by a popularly supported central government. This volume illustrates how an authoritarian, nondemocratic government has been established in Venezuela.

As a result of Pretoria's 1976 imposition of independence on the "black homeland" of Transkei, its capital city, Umtata, became one of the first communities in South Africa to experience fundamental changes in the apartheid. This timely book discusses those relationships that remained unchanged, as well as the important race and class realignments that accompanied apartheid's dismantling. Walton R. Johnson shows that although the universal franchise radically altered municipal government and desegregation changed access to some public and private amenities, transformation of the basic patterns of dominance and subordinance occurred slowly. He describes how the established dominant group perpetuated key parts of the old order by guiding and manipulating a pliable new African middle class. For the mass of Africans the facade was new, he makes clear, but the underlying structures were the same: effective social and political control stayed for a long while in the hands of the white elite and few new economic opportunities opened for Africans. His chapter on personal ideologies shows how deeply cultural much of this behavior was. Providing an informed account of change and continuity in one town, Dismantling Apartheid is a compelling preview of future social relations in South Africa.

"This collection surveys major areas of neoliberal policy restructuring by various levels of Canadian government. Unlike other academic studies it also considers theoretical and practical issues connected with movements of resistance against the neo-liberal agenda. Part one situates these developments theoretically in the context of globalizing capitalism and the changing role of the state, the labour market, policy formation and federalism. Section two examines six major areas of policy restructuring, ranging from health care and education to human rights and communication policy. The final section considers the strengths and weaknesses of current political strategies of resistance and the new challenges imposed by global capitalist restructuring. This volume provides both a vital assessment of the social consequences of neoliberal restructuring and a provocative contribution to the debate over the renewal of the left in Canada."--pub. desc.